The One Safe Place (11 page)

Marshall was perched on the other stool behind the counter, reading a book which Stephen King had been unable to put down. He adopted the crouch which Don knew meant he was going to read at least to the end of a paragraph and probably of a chapter. Don listened to the chimes of the cathedral across the road and the hollow blare of a train in the station beyond the cathedral, and watched the flickering of sunlight shuttered by passing traffic, an effect which made the books nearest the doorway appear to tremble with eagerness to be read. Books occupied the entire height of the interior walls and both sides of three parallel bookcases almost as wide as the shop, but Marshall had found his latest reading in the tray of paperbacks which loitered on the sidewalk. He raced to the end of the chapter and smoothed out a corner which a previous reader had turned down, and inserted a dinosaur bubble-gum card between the pages. "Hut?" he said.

"That's what I figured. Get a small one between us. Remember where Pizza Hut is?"

"Come on, dad, why wouldn't I? Between McDonald's and Burger King."

"See how they're bending over backward to make us feel at home," Don said, only to wish he hadn't when the sole present customer, a man who was leaning backward and raising his spectacles on their cord so as to scan a top shelf, pursed his whitish lips. "How much do you need? Here's two, here's another two. Four quids should cover it."

The customer lowered his head and let the spectacles slide down as far as his enlarged purple nose would allow. "Quid, to be precise, unless you mean tobacco. I don't think the language has been quite so radically revised yet, even slang."

"Just being facetious. Marshall knew that, didn't you, son?"

"Believe it. Don't sell my book, okay?"

"What class of material are the young reading these days? I suppose we should be grateful that they read," the bespectacled customer said, and approached the counter to peer at the cover. "On reflection, perhaps not. What is this kind of thing for?"

"Fun?" Marshall suggested.

"Isn't there enough unpleasantness abroad without imagining this kind of pah?" The customer flipped the book onto its face as though to hide its naked skull and scanned the blurb. "A nightmare from which you'll be afraid to wake. Why on earth give yourself that, child?"

"I don't get nightmares from reading books."

"From where, then?" said the customer with a sharp look over his spectacles at Don.

"Do you want me to go for the pizza, dad?"

"Follow your stomach."

Marshall pocketed the coins and ran up the stone steps, and Don hoped the boy had no reason to brood over the customer's last question. Since leaving the neighbourhood bullies behind in West Palm Beach he'd been sleeping more soundly, and even the child's voice on the phone at the party hadn't disturbed Marshall as much as it had affected his parents. Maybe the call hadn't been meant for him—Clement Daily had assumed it was only because of the age of the caller, and hadn't been able to distinguish a single word. The police had advised the Travises to contact them if there was another such call, but why should there be? He felt as though the customer's gaze, bespectacled now, was accusing him of having somehow caused it, except that the man was chastising Marshall's book with a stubby forefinger. "I trust you keep an eye on the ideas your son puts in his head."

"Do my best," Don said, raising his own spectacles and wondering what fool had once declared the customer was always right. "Were you looking for anything special?"

"May I assume we're speaking man to man?" the other said, wetting his lips with his shocking pink tongue, then pirouetted toward the nearest shelf as three people came down the steps.

He thought they were together until he saw one of them was the mailman. Nor did the two men in suits appear to know each other, because they started browsing on opposite sides of the room. The mailman planted on the counter the pile of Jiffy bags and cartons which had hidden his face, and mopped his forehead before trotting streetward. The first customer had been protruding each of his lips in turn as though he found the shop too crowded, and now he hurried to the steps before hoisting his spectacles to gaze through them across the shop at Don. "Don't think me interfering," he said, "but I really believe that giving your son access to such material is a form of child abuse."

"Interfering? How could anyone possibly—" By now Don was addressing either the deserted steps or the remaining browsers, each of whom emitted a reticent cough and shifted his position very slightly. Don quieted himself and turned to the mail.

Here was
And But,
the autobiography of a local poet whose poetry read like the work of a writer too lazy to organise it into prose and whose prose identified itself as the work of a poet by not beginning any sentence with a capital letter and only very intermittently putting dialogue in quotes. Perhaps he was so much in demand as a reader of his own work in pubs because he made his audience feel capable of reaching his standard if not surpassing it, Don thought, and inserted the customer's order slip between the pages to be phoned about later. Here was a wants list from a dealer in a Scottish village which appeared to be called by a choice of names, Dairsie or Osnaburgh.
Blind Stomachs, The Still Small Loaves, The Rotters of Rotterdam, Eating Earwigs, The Priest Beneath the Bridge, The Slow Teeth, Ten Little Niggers
not
Indians
... "Not
Ten Vertically Challenged Members of an Ethnic Minority,"
Don muttered to himself, pushing the list away for later scrutiny, and was unpicking the staples of a Jiffy bag when he smelled the pizza approaching.

Videocassettes spilled out of the bag as Marshall dumped the boxed pizza on the counter. "Who sent you those?"

"Ross at Blockbuster," Don informed him, having discovered a letter among the cassettes. "Well, will you look at this. All I did was send him a couple of movie books that are only published here, and he's sent us a bunch of the movies I told him I couldn't believe were censored in Britain. 
Stallone and Arnie and Steven Segal. Some of your favourites, and maybe some for your mother to use with her students."

"Can we watch one tonight?"

"What, a student? That's called voyeurism."

One of the men cleared his throat, and the other coughed as though they were exchanging mating calls, and it occurred to Don that the conversation might be embarrassing either or both. He made space on the counter to open the pizza box and lifted out a slice, tilting it to catch streamers of melted cheese. "How much change was there?"

Marshall disengaged a slice and blushed. "Can I pay you back when we get home?"

"Sure, but in future I'd like you to ask first. You still haven't told me how much."

"Sixty pees."

"It's a good job Mr. Disapproving isn't still around to hear you mauling the language. I hope I get to share the candy."

"I didn't buy any."

"What else does sixty pee buy, or is it a secret?"

"I didn't buy anything, dad."

Don chewed fast and swallowed. "Don't tell me you were robbed."

"No, dad, of course not, truly."

"So are you going to explain the vanishing trick?"

Marshall held up the remains of his slice of pizza in front of his face and lowered his voice. "Dad..."

"You'll drip cheese if you're not careful."

"Dad, there was a lady and her baby sitting on the sidewalk outside Pizza Hut with a card saying they were homeless," Marshall said rapidly, and chomped on the slice.

"Okay, Marshall. That's nothing to be ashamed of, for you to be, I mean," Don told him, and realised Marshall was embarrassed by being overheard. "It's all right, son. Nobody's listening but me."

As though to confirm this, the man who'd been pulling books half off the shelves nearest the door approached the counter, lowering his perceptibly unequal eyebrows and opening his large loose mouth. "Have you
Holding Onto My Lamppost
by George Formby?"

Don laid the remains of his slice of pizza on the open lid of the box. "Excuse the lunch. Is that a record?"

"It's his life story told by him."

"I can't say I've come across it. I don't suppose you brought any napkins, Marshall?"

"Sorry, dad."

"How about
Room for a Little One
by Arthur Askey?"

Don used his handkerchief to clear away a strand of cheese which he'd become aware was drying on his chin. "No again, I'm sorry. All the books on theater and film—"

"One Hand on My Fiddle
by Ted Ray?
Twenty Years in Knickers and a Dress
by Arthur Lucan?"

"They're British... ?"

"Of course they're British."

"I was going to say theater and film are over in that corner, only I don't recall those names."

"Too British?"

If the man wanted books on British comedians, which Don took them to be, why had he been browsing in the criminology section? He didn't even seem particularly interested in the answers to his questions; he kept glancing toward Marshall as though the sight of pizza being eaten held a disagreeable fascination for him. Nevertheless Don said, "Sorry," but was sorry that he had, since the man turned brusquely and headed for the door. "Should be called the Sorry Shop," Don was half convinced he heard him mutter.

"I should bag those videos while we can distinguish them from pizza," Don advised Marshall, and the man went into rewind. He was backing down the steps to make way for a woman preceded by a wheeled tartan basket full of books. He left the shop as she drove the basket to the counter and raised her small flat face beneath its grey thatch to Don. "You don't just sell books, do you?"

"Just sell, no. Sell just, yes. What have you, oh." The lid of the basket had flopped open, exposing a haphazard heap of
Reader's Digest Condensed Books,
which—along with the magazine itself, and car repair manuals, and
By Love Possessed,
and
The Red and the Green,
and almost anything by H. G. Wells which wasn't science fiction and hadn't been filmed, and books which debunked the occult rather than gulping it down—it was his experience that more people wanted to sell than to buy. "Anything besides those?"

"They're improved, those books. They don't take as long to read."

Don had the distinct impression that he wasn't the first bookseller whom she'd found less than enthusiastic. "Some of the authors mightn't feel improved," he said.

"They're paid, aren't they? More than they're worth, most of them, if you ask me. Folk nowadays haven't time to read these big fat things you've got gathering dust."

"You'd be surprised how fat you can be and stay popular." Don saw before he'd completed the sentence that he might have worded it more tactfully, since she wasn't what anyone besides her family was likely to call slim, but he'd been distracted by realising that the second suited man had at some point slipped out unnoticed by him. "I wonder sometimes if I'll see the day when books are sold by weight."

She could have taken that as some measure of agreement, but she only rocked the basket as though to soothe the books. "You're from the States, aren't you?"

"Could you tell by the pizza?"

"By the accent," she said in a tone which made him feel smaller than Marshall. "So are these books."

"I can only apologise." Most of his mind was on trying to identify whether any stock had vanished with the man. His words having caught up with him, he said, "Have you thought of trying the markets?"

"I've more than thought. Are you not even going to look at them?"

"If they're all in that format..." When she only stared he said even more feebly, "I really wish..."

"God, I'd like to land you all such a thump." For a moment the woman resembled a bulldog about to leap at him as representative of his profession. Instead she towed the basket as far as the steps before casting a disparaging glance at the pizza. "You'd think you were running a takeaway," she said, and left a trail of rubbery bumps behind her all the way to street level.

Marshall finished the last mouthful of his half of the pizza. "Never mind, dad."

"I don't. Fun of a kind, I thought, didn't you?" As that provoked Marshall's version of his grin, Don set about checking the shelves. "Have half that last slice if you want," he said, though the encounters with customers had left him feeling hungrier than ever.

At least no books appeared to have been stolen, and after that the day started to pick up. A young woman with a trace of paint under her fingernails bought more than two hundred pounds' worth of illustrated Victorian books from the display in the locked bookcase, and a researcher from Granada Television bought a rare first of
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
for his producer and a variety of review copies for himself. A reviewer with a hip flask peeking from his back pocket brought in at least a dozen new unread hardcovers, one of which the author of a novel Stephen King had found unputdownable had been unable to relinquish. Marshall finished the book he was reading and took a breath and commenced that one. Don rang the future owner of
And But,
who spent more than half their brief contact in shouting at her dog, then he turned to listing the books he'd bought during the past month but not yet sold.

He was enjoying handling and describing them when Marshall emitted a sound of surprise. No book he read was deemed to be much good unless it earned at least a few audible gasps, and so Don didn't look up until he heard, "Mom, you're early."

"Shall I go away again so you can be men together?" Susanne shaded her face as she descended the steps, and when she took her hand away her long snub-nosed wide-mouthed face seemed to glow with the light in her large eyes. Her hair the color of sunbleached corn swayed forward as she leaned across the counter to kiss Don and then Marshall, who glanced over her shoulder in case anyone saw him. "Good day so far?" she said as Marshall returned to his book.

"Eventful is the word that springs to mind. Are we still on for dinner at the Koreana and a movie at the Cornerhouse, or does the look you aren't quite keeping to yourself forebode a change of plan?"